Pacific Fire by Greg van Eekhout

friend, or a cop, whether asked out of idle curiosity or from someone making a business proposal or interrogating him or beating him or begging him for magic to heal a wound. The answer was always supposed to be the same: No.
    He glanced toward the house. The children were standing on the back steps in their pajamas.
    â€œI’m more of an ingredient than a proper osteomancer.”
    â€œHow powerful?”
    â€œVery,” Sam said. “A high-value ingredient for any soup.”
    Fernando nodded. “If there’s a problem, if there’s trouble, if you can help my wife but you decide not to, because it’ll compromise your own safety, because it’ll cost you something … if my wife comes to harm and you didn’t do everything you could to help her, osteomancer or not…”
    He didn’t finish the sentence, nor did he need to.
    â€œI will,” Sam said.
    Fernando gave Sofía a final look, even more intimate than the kiss, and he returned to the house to stand with the children.
    Sam took the front passenger seat while Em buckled herself into the back. When Sofía was done with her preflight routine, she waved toward the house, at Fernando and her children. They all waved back, as though she were just heading off for work. The engine coughed into life and the five-bladed propeller became a blur.
    Sofía taxied onto a strip of flattened dirt between rows of alfalfa, and without ceremony she commenced a rumbling sprint. Sam hadn’t anticipated things would be so loud. Every creak and squeak from the plane no doubt signaled a vital screw coming loose or a spar cracking. He’d seen planes in flight, of course, but he’d never actually been in one. Clearly, the whole enterprise was a hoax.
    Sam didn’t imagine Sofía would run them into the irrigation ditch at the end of the air strip, at least not for the first several seconds of takeoff. Then he began to suspect it was a possibility. And then it became a certainty. Only his unwillingness to humiliate himself in front of Em kept him from emitting a panicked little squeal.
    When the ride smoothed out and Sam looked down to find they were several feet off the ground, he let out a quiet breath of relief. All was forgiven.
    Minutes later, they were in deep sky. The stars twinkled above, and lights from water projects and lonely desert settlements twinkled below.
    Sofía motioned for Sam to put on the bulky headphones dangling in front of him. Em already had her set on.
    â€œYou kids ever fly before?”
    â€œYeah,” Em said, without elaborating. No doubt she’d participated in some kind of avian black ops, probably involving parachuting and maybe some wing walking.
    â€œNot me,” said Sam.
    â€œWell, make yourself comfortable. Sick bags are under your seats. We’ll be heading south a while, and then a right turn over the San Andreas Abyss. Most pilots hate flying over it, so I don’t expect company. But if you see a moving light out there, anything that looks like it could, might, maybe be a plane, don’t assume I see it, too. Tell me.”
    The Abyss had about the same reputation as the Bermuda Triangle, but Sofía sounded chipper. She liked flying her plane. And once Sam got used to the noises and jolts and vibrations, he was surprised to find he liked it, too. Loved it, actually. If he closed his eyes, he was no longer inside a flying machine with a fuel-combustion engine. It was him flying, not the airplane. He wanted to open his door and step out and spread his arms and race beside the airplane. He wanted to soar up beyond the thin gauze of clouds. The Hierarch had eaten garuda raptor and other flying creatures. Maybe flight was in Sam’s bones.
    A little while later, the plane banked a sharp right turn. Sam looked over the dials arrayed before Sofía and found the compass. They were going west now, toward Los Angeles and Catalina. Since leaving the capital, Daniel